There is no end in sight to the pollution caused by a ‘broken’ system. Experts say it could even be getting worse
Sarah Lambert took her usual morning swim for 40 minutes off Exmouth town beach before her volunteer shift helping disabled people get access to the water. A wheelchair user herself, Lambert’s regular sea swims twice a week between the lifeboat station and HeyDays restaurant were the perfect form of exercise for her disability.
It was August 2024, and a dry summer’s day on England’s south-west coast.
At 4.15pm, lifeguards shut the beach, erected red flags and asked people to leave the water after East Devon district council was alerted to a catastrophic burst of the main pipe pumping sewage to the town’s Maer Lane treatment works. But it was too late for Lambert. She started vomiting later that day and was admitted to hospital suffering life-threatening sepsis after being infected by E coli and Citrobacter bacteria, both of which are commonly found in sewage.
Anger about the state of the privatised water industry in England intensified this week after the screening of Channel 4’s docudrama Dirty Business. It weaves the human tragedy of the death from E coli 0157 poisoning of eight-year-old Heather Preen in 1999, who had paddled just the other side of the Exe estuary from Lambert’s swimming spot, with the unfolding of an environmental and public health crisis. It explores three decades of underinvestment by water companies, uncovered in part by amateur sleuths Peter Hammond and Ash Smith, as well as the cosy relationship between the water companies and those meant to be holding them to account….
-============================
After the truth-shower 